Anyone ever considered using USB as a (simple) control network instead of using something like CAN?
The USB master could be a small computer, maybe running Linux. The devices to be controlled could be based on the PIC18F2450 USB Microcontroller.
Bad idea?
AFAIK the rocketry club at Portland State University is planning just that. You would have to manage your network closely to achieve any high level of determinism, but from my small knowledge of USB it could be done.
All in all I think using CAN would be safer, and in the end easier than trying to wedge USB into an application that it wasn't intended for.
-- Tim Wescott Wescott Design Services http://www.wescottdesign.com Posting from Google? See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/ "Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" came out in April. See details at http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html
Can you live with the short cable lengths (5m)?
Probably some people started considering it. But I bet most stopped the moment they realized that USB isn't really a network, by any stretch of the meaning of that word. And that's before you consider that the necessary hubs alone will can easily waste more power than the entire collection of devices you wanted to control.
-- Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker@physik.rwth-aachen.de) Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.
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